pumpkinstrokemarrow

But the crossbow led onto something called a Dutch arrow, the weapon of choice of kids charging about Epsom Common thiry years ago. A device made of a peice of string with a knot in the end and a notched arrow which works rather like a sling shot or the spear throwers used by aboriginals of various places. Apparently you can throw an arrow a good distance with one of these. Might do some damage if you hit the right thing, but I would have thought that accuracy would not be a strength of this particular contraption. I couldn't grasp how one got the knot to lodge in the notch and then to release at the right moment, but a few minutes with Mr G. reveals all, in the form of a clip on Youtube. It seems that plenty of other people are into these things, not least the Boy Scouts, despite the worryings of their leaders about health and safety. Also known as Swiss arrows, French arrows and Yorkshire arrows. Various variations have been around for thousands of years, but largely displaced in modern Europe by the bow and arrow. Odd that I never came across these things in my youth, given that we did other charging around the woods sort of activities and certainly made rather bad bows and arrows.

Saw a whole new form of lorry yesterday, on the way to Cheam, as ever. Largish lorry with a four wheeled trailer of about the same size, with a large blue container on the lorry and another, identical, on the trailer. Very roughly, 8 feet square in section and 20 feet long. Slightly less roughly, the shape of a hayrick from the days when farmers still built such things. But not actually square in section. Actually a bilaterally symetrical pentangon. Flat bottom, two sides sloping gently outwards, the last two sides forming a gently sloping pitched roof, running along the length of the thing. These last looked as if they lifted for filling and emptying. Contraptions/fittings at each end of each container which might have supported tipping the things up for emptying. All of which is all well and good, but why I have never seen such things before? What industry or activity do they support? Without a name hard to ask Mr G. Maybe I have to browse catalogues from waste management contractors. So I try the people who run the grandly named waste management park north of Cambridge, so grand that its grand opening include a cabinet member from the environment committee from Canbridgeshire County Council. Someone with the monika of Shona. A word which I thought was the name of a language spoken in wide swathes of east Africa but perhaps it is a girls' name as well. But getting back to the point, the gang whom I remember as Dickerson but who are actually to be found at http://www.donarbonltd.co.uk/. Sadly nothing like the lorry and trailer in question to be hired from any of their three divisions.

Back at TB, I was also put right on the issue of the vacuum cleaning lorry which was doing more harm than good. It seems that I was quite wrong to think that the operative had got the vacumm cleaning part of the lorry on in reverse. I am advised that it is much more likely that the vacuum cleaner bag was full; which has much the same results as when the vacuum cleaner bag on a domestic vacuum cleaner is full. Leaves little heaps of rubbish all over the place, with a zero net pick up rate.

I close with a factoid from France. I had rather laboriously deduced when reading my last detective story from Fred Vargas that a cliche was a word for a snap. A picture made with a camera. But without giving the matter much thought at the time. But then, today I start to wonder why our word for cliche means holiday snap in France. Harraps does its stuff and tells me that clicher is a verb mean to stereotype, a printing activity. So our work cliche actually means stereotype. Which is not so silly after all. One can see how one got there.